New hope that oil spill will spare sea life

Press, 11 August 1979, Page 8

New hope that oil spill will spare sea life

NZPA-Reuter Corpus Christi (Texas) Officials were hopeful yesterday that masses of drifting oil spewed from a blown-out Mexican well would not cause severe damage to delicate marine life on the Texas coastline. The oil, which has been spilling out of the well for two months, continued northward up the Gulf of Mexico, with one main concentration in an area about 32km by 80km east of the border town of Brownsville.

Coastal officials, attempting to protect the delicate marine breeding inlet of Laguna Madre on the southeast Texas coast, have rigged an experimental nylon net on containment booms in a channel cutting through to the area from the offshore Padre Island strip.

Captain Roger Madson of the United States Coast Guard said much of the oil

was moving in a thin sheen, or film, which washed on to beaches in the southern part of Padre Island in the form of small tar balls, which he said were relatively easy to clean up. He did not expect the impact on southern Texas beaches to be any greater.

The net to protect marine life extends 2m below the boom and is designed to keep the tar balls out of Laguna Madre. Officials said that if the system proved ' effective, more nets would be strung on booms anchored off the tourist beaches of South Padre Island.

Oceanographers, meanwhile, reported some encouraging results from toxicity tests made on various types of sea life. Scientists at the University of Texas Marine Laboratory said they had found that the oil was not significantly toxic to some adult forms of

marine life. But they said that it could be extremely hazardous to fish eggs and newly hatched fish fry.

Officials are concerned over the impact of the oil spill on Texas’s shrimp industry, especially since some oil is beginning to sink. Particles have been found as deep as 120 m in Gulf of Mexico waters.

Another big concentration of oil is off Tampico, Mexico, which is about 384 km south of the United States border.

A Marine Laboratory official said: “There is a lot of oil down south. Nobody knows what it is going to do.”

The well, Ixtoc One, off the Yucatan Peninsula, has been spewing oil at 30,000 barrels a day. Experts are trying to cut the flow by injecting steel and lead balls into the well head, 50m below the surface.